Jeremy Clarksons first marriage would end in divorce within a year, but yesterday ex-wife Alex Hall told how they went on to enjoy a ten-year affair after the motoring journalist married second wife Francie.
At one point the Top Gear philanderer even told her he had cheated on both of them with a BBC colleague.
Mrs Hall revealed how she and Clarkson would enjoy take-away curries followed by sex sessions at his London bolthole.
Details of the alleged affair emerged after Clarkson, 51, lifted a gagging order which prevented Mrs Hall from disclosing intimate details of their relationship.
Despite branding him a ‘bully and a hypocrite’ over the decision to take out the injunction, businesswoman Mrs Hall likened Jeremy Clarkson to a pair of ‘comfy slippers’ whom she never got over after their split in 1990…two years after he joined BBC’s Top Gear.
She claimed the pair rekindled their relationship in 1999 after she sent him a note saying ‘Call me’ with her phone number.
After a lunch in a Notting Hill restaurant, they spent that evening at Clarkson’s Fulham flat – where he kept a sofa bed they had bought together years before.
The presenter often stays in the capital for work purposes during the week, travelling home to his wife in Oxfordshire at weekends.
Mrs Hall said: ‘We watched TV and had an Indian take-away. We started on the sofa then ended up in bed together. It was so natural and normal. He initiated it. It was just like the old times, like we’d never been apart.’
She said the decade of deceit began a few months later when Clarkson once more got in touch. Again they would enjoy a take-away – Clarkson’s favourite was chicken madras, she said – before spending the night together at either’s flat. Many of the liaisons took place after Clarkson had been filming at the Top Gear track at Dunsfold aerodrome in Surrey.
Clarkson even admitted to her that he was ‘frolicking with a colleague’.
He had to explain himself to his first and second wife after he was pictured embracing BBC presenter Elaine Bedell at the height of his affair in 2003.
Mrs Hall said: ‘I said to him in a text or phone call: “Oh dear, you’re gonna get into trouble, I told you I was the only person you could sleep with who wasn’t your wife”.’
Although the star rarely took her out during the alleged secret romance, Mrs Hall, 46, said they once stayed at the four-star Parador de Ronda hotel while Clarkson was filming Top Gear in southern Spain in 2007.
She said she still loved Clarkson and wanted him back. ‘I don’t feel we committed adultery during the affair because he was my husband,’ she said. ‘He was like a pair of comfy slippers.
‘I know he’ll call again in about six months, I will see him and it will carry on.’
The mother-of-two, from Surrey, claimed she had ‘honoured and loved’ Clarkson for 28 years since they got together when she was just 17 and he was 22.
The pair married in 1989 at St Andrew’s Church in South Warnborough, Hampshire, and honeymooned in Mauritius.
But within six months, Clarkson wrote in his newspaper column on Saturday, she ‘admitted to a number of flings’ and left him for another man – friend Stephen Hall, now a 54-year-old property developer.
They went on to marry in February 1993 – two months before Clarkson wed Francie, 50 – but divorced in 1996 after having two children.
Mrs Hall said she couldn’t hide her feelings for Clarkson from her second husband and described leaving the heavy smoking presenter a ‘huge mistake’.
She said that on September 22, 2009, which would have been their 20th wedding anniversary, Clarkson sent a text to Alex which simply read: ‘Do you know what day it is?’
‘That is not somebody who has forgotten and moved on,’ said Mrs Hall, who by then had met somebody else and said she had stopped returning Clarkson’s calls and texts.
Clarkson told last week how he lifted the injunction, imposed last year, because it was ‘pointless’ to continue when speculation over his identity was rife in the ‘legal-free world’ of the internet.
Mrs Hall’s allegations come five months after it was claimed Clarkson cheated on his wife with Top Gear Live tour colleague Phillipa Sage, 42.
Clarkson claimed in his newspaper column Mrs Hall had contacted him 15 years ago, after his TV career had started to take off, demanding ‘money for her silence’.
He added: ‘Eventually, these demands became so hysterical and so huge, my wife and I were forced to take out an injunction. But thanks to Twitter and the internet, it didn’t work.’
Mrs Hall denies attempting to blackmail the star.
Francie yesterday denied claims she had kicked the presenter out of their country home near Chipping Norton after allegations of the affair left her ‘at the end of her tether’.
by Lorelle Heath
